wefalck

Over here in Europe at least, coal was traditionally delivered either in large wicker-baskets or in jute-sacks. Perhaps it would have been the easiest to just keep the baskets standing on deck? Unlike in seagoing ships, there probably wasn't much rocking and rolling on the river, so no worries that the fuel might go overboard.

What kind of belt-sander is it?

I tend to rub bare metal parts, particularly when they are supposed to be cast-iron, with a soft pencil. You could still follow your idea to sort of make some dashes on the rim of the ratched wheel.

I can see the point of having the boiler forward on boats destined to operate on tropical rivers, but in areas, where temperatures may be rather low (but not that low that the river freezes over), the long steam-pipes must have caused a lot of power losses on the way to the cylinders. There doesn't seem to be any insulation? On the other hand, having the boiler under one's feet might have been appreciated in the pilot house in winter.

You could simulate the metal hardware by painted paper strips ... For the ratched wheel I wouldn't use cardboard, this has the tendency to fuss when worked with something else, but a sharp knife. On the other hand, you could draw the profile of the wheel in a suitable drawing program on the computer, print it out and stick it to a cardboard disc; then take a sharp cutter and cut out the spaces between the teeth. I suppose the prototype ones would have been rather rustic ...

Perhaps I didn't actually look to closely at the beginning, I didn't realise that this is a boat with hard chines. In this case the stringers, kind of serving as landing for the next strake make perfect sense. In fact, there are also carveel building techniques, where the individual strakes are joined by interior stringers. I think this is actually a rather old technique, practiced since antiquity in the Mediterranean. They both, reinforced the construction and ensured watertightness. In the Nordic countries laths were used to hold down the caulking of moss in some types of boats.

Allen is right, as the stringers also serve as 'shelves' for the thwarts normally. I have seen, however, clinker-boats, where the bent-in frames do not touch the planks along their whole width.

Copper was quite expensive in the old North, but they had plenty of bog iron inter alia. To my knowledge these ships were always iron-fast. In fact, for some of the famous boat finds, the nail pattern is the only thing that was found, the wood has long be decomposed.

And, so ?

Thatching in Europe and Japan is a serious business and the workmen take great pride in its execution to ensure that it is watertight and its longevity. I think thatching with straw is rarely practiced anymore, but in some areas of Europe (for instance, the Cotswolds in England, northern Germany, Denmark, ...) it is still practiced with reeds. It's expensive and fire-insurance premiums are high, but people like to preserve the traditional appearance of their houses. I happen to have a little booklet about thatching practice in England and watched it in execution on the building of a museum near Hamburg, where an uncle of mine was a volunteer. Model railway guys predominantly reproduce reed-roofs, which have a geometrically quite well-described shape and a uniform surface. I gather, the 'gaming' modellers, who work on medieval subjects, may have techniques for roofs thatched with straw. However, they tend to work in a somewhat exaggerated 'cartoon', rather than naturalistic style. I could imagine various routes to reproduce such thatched roofs. Next time you are down Mexico-way, you could try to find some dry grass, hammer it to break the fibers and comb it with a bristle-brush to remove small and loose bits. Alternatively, you could try to find some plumber's hemp and also brush it to straighten out the fibres. I would then put two strips of self-adhesive tape in the distance of the scale-length of the stalks, lay out the fibres in not too thick layers and spray them with some matt varnish to lightly glue them together. Once dry, you can cut swaths of this 'thatch' and glue them in rows onto the lattice work, beginning from the bottom. Normally the thatch is 'sewn' to the lattice work and you could reproduce that.

After-thought-job well done! It's those details that really make the difference. It's not easy to have all the necessary foresight, but I make myself a mental plan for working 'inside-out' in order to minimise interference. It does not always work though 😬

I have been subscribed to both channesl for years ... 'clickspring' is a genius with handtools, particularly the file. The Taig is sold in the UK/Europe under the name Peatool, btw., but https://www.cartertools.com is indeed a useful site and I got lots of ideas from it over the years though I don't have a Taig. Although I was lucky to get some basic lathe instruction from an old mechanic, who ran the hobby-workshop (equipped with outdated toolroom machinery that the Swiss precision industry donated) at my university, it was not until many years later that I could afford my own lathe. I got myself various apprentice text books from the 1940s/50s (before CNC creeped in) to learn the basics, De Carlè's book (The Watchmaker's and Model Engineer's Lathe), as well as various historical mechanic's handbooks. The latter are good, because they contain useful ideas for manual lathe work and work-arounds that by today's mechanics (and H&S officers ...) may be snuffed upon or are considered inefficient (such as grinding your own HSS lathe-tools).

They would be also easy to make yourself ... there are few examples on MSW.

My knowledge of 16th/17th century rigging is rather limited, but I think such 'pockets' in sails did not come into use until the second half of the 19th century on sports boats. The idea is normally to transmitt the stress from halliards, sheets etc. to the sail over a larger area through the bolt-rope. While toggle-like devices were used since antiquity, I tend to think that the ends of the mini-spar would have passed through two eyes form by the bolt-rope and the two pendants of the block would have then been put over these. I have no idea, why the method was chosen, but it seems to have been common on Dutch vessels for the foresail. Perhaps a PM to Ab Hoving, our resident specialist for Dutch vessels of the 16th and 17th century, could bring some enlightenment?

I know next to nothing about the Allies' movement after the actual landing. However you could take GoogleMaps and sort of map out the trajectories indicated on the road signs. Taking for instance the third from left in the lower row that reads Paris-Rouen-Cabourg-Deauville, this must be located at a branch road somewhat south of the coast, somewhere between Cabourg and Deauville. If it where west of Cabourg, you should have Deauville above Cabourg. So from where the sign is, you would get to the main road between Cabourg and Deauville (probably the modern D531) and then turn either left to Cabourg or right to Deauville. From Deauville you would go South and pass Rouen (on the other side of the river) in the distance and continue on the N13 (today A13, Autoroute de Normandy). You could use similar reasoning to locate approoximately the other signs.

Shouldn't we rather promote the 'good' stuff or the making of it ?

The model railway guys have the same problem and different manufacturers offer rub-on lettering and decals. Some of the above manufacturers also offer custom decals or rub-on lettering. In the model railway sector you can also find 3D-lettering in polystyrene, which can be pre-painted, assembled on some sticky tape and the cemented to the name-board using clear varnish. Once set the sticky tape can be removed and the white paint on the letters touched up if needed. Freehand-painting would be a challenge (at least for me) but can done. Draw the lettering with pencil, perhaps using one of those old-fashioned lettering-templates and then begin to construct the letters inside-out. One can always touch up with black paint and then pull everything together with varnish. There are also old-fashioned lettering pens for working with the mentioned templates that could be used with white pigmented ink or very dilute acrylic paint. If you are not so sure-handed with the brush, e.g. Faber Castell (Pitt Artist Pen Brush) makes pigmented markers with a fine brush-like tip in many colours, including white. However, the coverage of white is not so dense and may require repeated applications with the risk of messing it up.

I think this is internally the same as that Chinese-sourced that was given to me by my wife a couple of years ago. I found its RPMs rather aggressive for many applications. It also somewhat irritating that on switching on you have the highest RPM and then one steps down. The high speed seems to be due to the fact that it is mainly inted for glass-engraving with diamond bits. I suppose this tool also does not use collets, but is bored for the ubiquitous 2.34 mm-shaft tools. You can get burrs, drills, grinding stones, polishers, sanding arbors etc. from many different sources, though the quality may vary ...

The most radical solution would be to stop buying kits 😉 Otherwise, it might be possible to turn the 'threads' supplied by kit manufacturers into 'rope' using a (home-made) ropewalk ...

My understanding is that this paper summarises the 2020 knowledge on the subject: Vale, B. (2020): Pitch, Paint, Varnish and the Changing Colour Schemes of Royal Navy Warship, 1775-1815: A Summary of Existing Knowlege.- The Mariner’s Mirror, 106(1): 30-42. Analysis of VICTORY's multiple layers of paint shows that during a certain period she must have been pinkish, which is probably due to the fact that ships had to use up their pigment allocations before receiving more pigments and that there was an overstock of red-ochre at some time. As at that time only natural red or yellow ochre was used (no synthetic ochre yet available), there may have been a variation in the hue due to the natural variability of the raw material and were it was mined. In addition, it would have been 'stretched' with chalk, which was cheap in comparison. I don't know where the RN sourced its ochre at the time. Traditionally, the main source was the Roussillon region in Southern France, but I would venture the guess that during the hostilities with France, this was not so easily accessible by the RN. Perhaps it came from Sweden.

On more modern Dutch boats, this developed into a single large block with a straight lower edge and two hooks on each side. The hooks hooked into two eyelets at each corner of the short square head of the fore-sail. Have to look into my literature, whether there were any specific names for this. This answer at least your question, how it was attached to the sail.

Well, again, real life with travels around Europe, mostly private have got in the way, plus of course, holiday preparations. Some small visible progress only, though preparations for installing the ship’s boats are under way. Completion of the staying of the funnel According to the principle of working ‘inside-out’, installation of the outer pairs of funnel stays had been left to a moment, when other work would not interfere with them anymore. The remaining funnel stays installed The stays are chain and they were simulated in the same way as the chains for the rails etc. Luckily the lithograph represents these chain-stays by dotted lines, so that the points where they have to be made fast are known. Miniature eyebolts were fashioned from wire and glued into holes drilled for the purpose. They also received laser-cut washers of 0.5 mm diameter. The stays are set taught with lanyards made from thread as used in the old days for mending ladies’ ‘nylons’. Not sure, whether I showed pictures before of how I am making fake chains using twisted wire. The material is oxidised Konstantan (a Cu/Ni alloy), sofar the best material I found for the purpose due to its tensile strength. Twisting two 0.06 mm wires together so that the length of each ‘twist’ is the desired length of the chain link. Laying in half of the twisted wire and twisting it together in the opposite direction. The finished ‘chain’. Depending on the envisaged use, one could also pull the ‘chain’ through the fingers with some graphite to make the links more visible. Micro-marlin-spike In between I also spent some time on the lathe and made marlin-spike for the upcoming ropework. So far, I just used a hypodermic needle, but found holding it between the fingers not very satisfactory. I knew that hollow marlinspikes are being used for work with wire-rigging, but somehow it had not occurred to me to use it in the model-realm. Thanks to ‘archjofo’ who described his marlin-spike made from a sharpened piece of brass tube. Hypodermic needle as marlin-spike As I have quite a collection of hypodermic needles in my scrap-box, I selected a suitable size. The nice (real) ebony handle also has been in the scrap-box for a long time, waiting for a suitable use. I gather it came from my father’s estate, who had trained as a medical doctor during the war. At that time a lot of better-quality (biological, medical, dissecting) instruments that did not need to be sterile were made with ebony or ivory handles – looking rather elegant today. The handle was almost ready to use and needed just a bit of turning down, where the ferrule will be fitted. The ferrule was turned from 6 mm brass rod and drilled out for the handle. A deep hole for the 0.8 mm hypodermic needle was drilled. The ferrule is a tight fit on the handle, but was secured with a drop of PVA glue, while the needle was just driven into the slightly undersized bore. Micro-marlin-spike Hypodermic needles, of course, are meant to cut through the skin and in consequence have very sharp edges – not so good, when working with fine threads. The cutting edges, hence, were dulled with an Arkansa-stone. Micro-marlin-spike Using such marlin-spike, it is possible to make fake eyesplices with ropes as thin as 0.18 mm … The next post will concern the installation of the ship’s boats, perhaps the most dreaded operations of all due to the exceeding flimsiness of some parts. To be continued ....

kgstakes, it just occurred to me that the small PROXXON wood-lathe may be just the thing for your miniature furniture making and some ship-model work too: https://www.proxxon.com/en/micromot/27020.php I think on demand they can supply extra beds for very long work-pieces. I think I also saw once a dulicator, but I don't remember, whether this was a third-party product. As you can see from Twokidsnosleep's post, once you have a metal lathe, you can make all sorts of tools and fixtures to make more tools to ... one can easily diverted, once one has got the hang of it (see e.g.: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/toolsmain.html).

I only had a quick look at their Web-site, but wondered how the machine handles fumes? They say that once can cut acrylic glass several millimetres thick, which would generate quite a bit of not-so-healthy fumes. The same would apply for cutting polystyrene.

If the interior of the ship cannot be seen, you could have used 'fake' butts by putting a small piece of wood behind the strake, where there is no frame to land on.